2018, the Year of the Travel ItineraryNeed Help Stitching YOUR Italy Together?

One of the premises behind Wandering Italy is that there are many thousands of places to go scattered about the boot, each with attractions, special pasta sauce, old women gossiping on benches in the Piazza del Duomo and more. Some remote villages are difficult to access, but possess unique charms virtually unseen in our times. Perhaps you would like to hear about these places. Perhaps you would like to hear about Roberto squeezing little breadcrumb and cheese earthworms out of his ancient press into broth, a dish that will be part of your dinner after you’ve perfected the arduous task of producing ancient-looking faux art in his gal Irma’s studio. Perhaps someday you will visit a tiny town in Tuscany called Corsanico and hear the monumental organ of Vincenzo Colonna.

I leave it to the strong to figure out how to get to these places. I figure you can do it.

But then again there are those monumental road trips, the kind where 5 years after you’ve made the bumpy and curvy drive you’re talking to your sweet honey and you blurt out, “Hey, remember that drive we took from Alghero to Bosa in Sardinia? Remember the handsome sheep, the shimmering blue of the sea, the slumping green earth?” Sigh.

But What of the Big Trip? Follow the Piper!

A Procession in Paestum

What of those places in Italy folks talk about all the time? Start with the big three: Venice, Florence, Rome and add Rick Steve’s wide open back door called Le Cinque Terre. Then Taormina, the Amalfi Coast, The Greek temples at Agrigento. How do you stick all these places together?

You could, of course, just tough it out and find train or Autostrada routes, then find your hotels and apartments through the many such sites available around the web who maintain their different site colors but are, in reality, all owned by the same company. (This used to be called a monopoly, but today is called proudly “the free market”.)

Or you can have somebody else do it. There are always people ready to help those with a wallet that hasn’t already been emptied by astronomic health care costs.

RoutePerfect is one of those sites that will take on the task of getting your itinerary provisioned. It seems like if you know which of the big and medium cities you’d like to visit and how long you’d like to stay, you can stitch together an itinerary and then just leave the company to crank out the details of where to stay and how to get there.

RoutePerfect has a blog just in case you need a human to talk at you about the places you should be seeing.

As for Martha and I, we will continue to talk to the old women on the benches come dusk in the little towns we come across, we’ll poke our heads into busy kitchens and take the narrow stairways into the crypts.